Video training is undeniably one of the most popular methods, for self-taught programmers and according to Forbes, the most popular, amongst millennials.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. (Henry Ford)

As far as I know, many people are relying on one or more of the most popular video training platforms like Pluralsight, Udemy or Coursera but they use accounts funded by the company they are working for.

But what about those who don’t have that great benefit and cannot allow a budget around 300$/year for such purpose? Thankfully, youtube is hosting quite a few channels which offer top-quality material for software engineers. Below are my favorites, in no particular order.

Even master yoda agrees

DerekBanas: Derek is providing a diverse set of tech courses. From assembly and design patterns to Django, Rails and UML. His extremely clear accent makes subtitles useless. What I like about this channel, is that is not purely technical, but has a good grasp on the soft skills side of a developer’s life, like negotation and sales techniques.

thenewboston With 4350 videos, at the time of writing this article, this guy is literally recording while he is sleeping. Like Derek Banas, thenewboston(or Bucky Roberts as known in the real world) is providing tutorials on a wide variety of subjects. Programming courses are taking the lion’s share of the channel’s library but there a few for math, biology, and gaming.

FreeCodeCamp talks A great — and relatively recent — initiative from FreeCodeCamp, where various passionate people give talks on modern technical topics. You can even send your talk there, to be published. There is no reason to consume your time here, given there is a great article answering all the questions.

Success in Tech Ramon Lopez, the owner of this channel is a great software engineer I am following for some time now. Initially, I was attracted by his system design articles, but later I loved his career advice playlist too. It looks paused for a while now, I hope it will be refreshed soon.

Traversy Media A channel whose ower is heavily involved with web programming. A quick scroll in his playlists will leave you with no doubt. :) He is mostly focusing on Node.Js and vanilla Javascript but there is some fair share of PHP, Python, and CSS. My favorite part here, are the long videos he has created, where you can get a good grasp of the tech he is talking in about an hour, like this one.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this article. What are your favorite channels for learning stuff around the job? If you want to let people know or you have any questions/objections, feel free to post a comment below.

Interesting JavaScript videos indeed. I will totally have a look at the one about pair programming. It looks like he's having a very good medium blog as well. How about persuading him to clone/migrate them here :)